


Kisses by Sunflower Beds

by fanforfanatic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Smut, Time Travel, brief - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 19:34:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10646598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanforfanatic/pseuds/fanforfanatic
Summary: Cas can’t bring Dean back. But he can’t be without him. So Cas leaves to meet versions of Dean he hasn’t come across before. Dean at three as a snotty toddler. At eight as a grubby child. At fifteen when he's already damaged. Cas travels through time to meet Dean throughout his life, different version of the man and Cas loves every single one.





	Kisses by Sunflower Beds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sharkfish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkfish/gifts).



In his last moments, Dean sees his life flash before his eyes which is how he knows that this time it will stick, knows it’s for good and there’s no coming back from this one.

In truth, he doesn’t actually see his life but feels it. He’s overwhelmed by a sense of accomplishment and he associates it to every time he took care of Sammy when they were children, got them through the night, got his kid brother to laugh instead of ask questions. He associates it with the first time he shot a firearm and his dad called him a natural. The first time he saved a life. The first time he saved the world. The first time he made Cas come.

A wave of joy hits him after that. Prank wars with Sam. Antics with Charlie. Driving Baby. His first lazy Sunday with Cas. Every lazy Sunday with Cas after that.

With his dying breath, Dean smells motor oil and pie and sex and honey and it all smells good. It smells perfect melded together, though it shouldn’t, and if it were bottled the label would read _Life of Dean Winchester_. He doesn’t smell blood or burning flesh or sulfur.

He hears his favourite tune along with Cas’ clumsy mumble and Sam’s off key singing.

Dean feels his life slip away with all his senses—save for sight. That’s not to say he doesn’t see anything. He sees tree twigs that look big in the chubby hands of children, he sees long dark hair he hasn’t encountered before, a stone path and a bed of sunflowers and the sight of an ugly yellow backpack in Baby’s backseat. He doesn’t remember any of these things, not really, but he still somehow recognises them. They feel like memories, like they belong to him.

Dean’s last thought is of the botanical garden Cas had wanted—insisted on—them going to. Dean didn’t care much for it but agreed because he wasn’t one to deny Cas anything. Still, it took them years to find the time to make the trip.

Sam decided to come along because there’s a library in the area that has a whole section on South American lore, something the bunker was lacking. He was essentially crashing their date so Sam offered shotgun to Cas.

He was a little cramped in the backseat and had to angle his body sideways to make room for his legs, but when Dean’s hand wasn’t on the gear shift it was in Cas’ so Sam didn’t mind so much.

Halfway there they got the call that lead the brothers to their final case. To this final moment where Dean’s only regret is that he doesn’t get the chance to be led around between patches of green by Cas as the angel prattles on about one fact or another.

 

It’s not like Cas didn’t know it would happen eventually, inevitably, but he thought he’d be the first to go. He’s the immortal one, and the Winchesters had a knack for surviving.

Still, knowing that something is going to happen, knowing that Sam and Dean would not live forever even though it felt like they should, doesn’t prepare him at all.

Sam and Dean go out like they always promised they would. Fighting. It’s an honourable death but what is the point of an honourable death, Cas wonders, when your loved ones are lost to you.

He drives the impala back to the bunker. He could have flown it but that didn’t feel right. He gets pulled over once and he thinks the officer takes pity on him. Cas can imagine what he looks like, the blue of his puffy eyes contrasting with the veiny red, hair looking like it’s been tugged at—because it has— his chapped gnawed-at lower lip stained red from iron-tasting blood.

He doesn’t make it to the bed he shares with Dean. He pretends it’s because the bedroom is too far down the hall and he’s so tired, but it’s because he can’t bear the sight of it. He stumbles—he _is_ exhausted—into a random room, sheds his trench coat halfway to the bed before he lands on it. Or lands on something on the bed.

_SUPERNATURAL by Carver Edlund_

It’s the room Charlie would stay in, he knows now. He doesn’t mean to, but he ends up cracking open the book and reading all about the first time Sam and Dean came across the croatoan virus.

It’s the real Dean; the depiction is accurate and these are real events from the hunter’s life, but it’s not _really_ Dean. It grows the already too wide hole inside of Cas. He can’t bring Dean back. But he can’t be without him. So Cas leaves to meet versions of Dean he hasn’t come across before, versions of Dean even Chuck didn’t take the time to write about.

 

Dean is three, almost four, when Cas, invisible, appears in the boy’s Lawrence home. Dean is kneeling on the sofa beside a pregnant Mary who tells him that it’s ok to touch.

“It’s your little brother in there, Dean,” she says.

Dean purses his still thin lips, scratches a hair full of hair that’s only blond like Mary’s in the summer, and says, “That’s where Daddy put him?”

Mary chokes a little when she laughs and moves into a tamed explanation of the birds and the bees.

Cas doesn’t listen; his eyes are peeled on Dean. This little boy who has no idea he’ll one day save a dying sun. This little boy that scrunches his face just like his Dean does, that shakily places a hand on his mother’s belly all false bravado, that has freckles splayed across his cheeks.

All Cas wants to do is to move closer. Is to stare. Is to see if three year-old Dean has all the freckles his Dean has or if some appeared with time. All Cas wants is to hold this boy. To tell him he’s perfect. To tell him he is loved. Cas can’t do any of these things.

He decides that’s unacceptable.

 

At eight Dean already knows how to shoot a firearm, so when the kids in his class want to pretend the sticks they find along the fence of the school lot are guns, he’s happy that one boy wants to stack twigs as high as he can instead.

Every recess, Dean looks for a pair of blue eyes and the darkest hair on the playground and the two go off together. Cas—though Dean calls him Scottie in this vessel—recounts to Dean these wild stories about a pair of heroes, and they run around reenacting them.

In this town, Dean doesn’t mind so much that he’s responsible for getting Sam and himself home to the motel. He doesn’t mind that his dad doesn’t pick them up like all the other kids’ dads do, because Dean gets to linger around the school and hang out with one of his first real friends.

One day, maybe two weeks since Dean transferred to this school, Dean says, “You can be the righteous man this time.” It's awesome that Scottie always lets him play the hero but Dean doesn’t mind trading.

Cas shakes his head. “It has to be you, Dean.”

 

At twelve Dean has seen more horror than most men twice his age, than men thrice his age, so when his new teacher asks Dean why he won’t just apply himself, Dean has a biting retort ready at the tip of his tongue.

Another kid in class speaks up first. Her name is Olive, an army brat that transferred in February just like Dean. She’ll probably get to finish the year here, Dean thinks. He knows he, on the other hand, won’t be around next week.

Cas uses Olive’s voice to rebel for Dean and tells the teacher to promptly fuck off.

Dean laughs, loud and rambunctious, a type of laugh he hasn’t had since Sammy started asking so many questions, then says, “Yeah, sweetheart,” with his trademark-to-be smirk directed at the professor.

Dean gets more than a full week at the school. They end up staying long enough, a solid two months, that John rents a trailer for them. He’s in detention almost every day but it’s okay because so is Olive.

They’re often left alone, so they get up to no good. Trolling the halls of the school after hours, setting up pranks and playing games. Dean thinks Olive must be really smart, must really know how to get inside people’s heads, because she always knows where he stashes himself when they play hide-and-seek. Or maybe she’s just good at looking for things. Or maybe she’s just good at finding Dean.

It’s very Breakfast Club and Olive is the Molly Ringwald to his Judd Nelson. Or maybe not because she’s not much of a princess and all Rebel. Maybe, with her, Dean doesn’t feel quite as angry as Bender anyway.

Until he is twenty nine, Dean will remember her as his first crush.

 

At fifteen, Dean is already a ladies man so he’s kissed a lot of pretty girls, but it’s his first time kissing a pretty boy. His hair is blond and curly (Dean wants to wrap a ringlet around his finger immediately.) and his eyes are blue and bright.

Cas introduces himself to Dean as Noah and they hit it off almost instantly. Noah is the furthest thing from every teenage stereotype Dean’s encountered through hopping from one school to the next. Noah knows too much about everything, more than a fifteen year old should know about anything. He speaks almost methodically and always with intent, and Dean likes that he talks to him more than anyone else.

They hang out in the patch of woods behind the high school and they talk about nonsense but sometimes they talk about things Dean wouldn’t tell another living soul. Things Dean usually doesn’t even dare to think about too loudly in case he taints his surroundings with his personal strand of _sick_.

Dean thinks Noah’s smile is too wide and earnest to corrupt. Like this boy could take Dean on, bruises and flaws and all.

Sometimes, they don’t talk at all. Dean just sits at the foot of a tree, arms resting on bent knees, and watches Cas watch the plants around them. Cas tells Dean about the different flowers, he picks up ladybugs on his finger tips, and he grins all the while. Dean watches.

John leaves them the impala for emergencies when he goes off on solo hunts now, opting instead for a stolen vehicle. Dean isn’t of age yet but it’s not like he doesn’t have a fake license and it’s not like he didn’t learn to drive years ago, so when Cas brings up the famed botanical garden in Athens, Georgia, just a two towns over, Dean only needs to be cajoled a little to agree to go.

Mostly he wants to see what Noah looks like in the only home he’s known. He looks good. He looks ethereal, with the sun filtering in through Baby’s window, illuminating the boy’s light hair like a halo.

At the garden, Dean allows himself to get dragged around and at first he only really listens to Cas because he likes the sound of his voice, deeper than his appearance suggests. Eventually, though, he listens because Cas tells him things like _oak trees are struck by lightning more than any other tree_ and _carrots were originally purple, you know_? Dean didn’t know.

Cas is talking about the bees now, about how it’s all there, the whole plan, about how there’s nothing to add. They’re by a bed of sunflowers, tall enough to shade them from the sun, when Dean decides he doesn’t want to hear Cas talk anymore. When he gently places a hand on the blond boy’s elbow to turn him. So that they’re facing each other. So that they’re leaning in. So that their lips brush and press. So that tongues can meet and take and taste.

Noah tastes like honey and something nutty.

John packs them up the very next day. He’s back and he’s got a lead, and he doesn’t allow Sam or Dean to say bye to any of their friends. Dean scolds himself. He should know better by now than to want things he can’t have.

 

Dean’s first solo hunt isn't exactly pre-approved by his father. In fact, Dean sneaks off to pursue the case. He’s freshly turned nineteen, has a GED in his back pocket and no prospects other than the family business. He’s not like Sam who could do so much more, be so much more, not that Dean thinks Sam would ever leave them.

Dean figures if hunting is going to be his career he’s going to have to strike off on his own, eventually. The case he tracks down is supposed to be an easy salt ‘n burn but quickly turns into a multi-haunting situation. Which is where he meets Cas for the umpteenth time, only this time Cas goes by Dylan.

She’s the town’s minister’s daughter, old enough to need convincing to let Cas in but devout enough that it doesn’t take much. He pretends she’s a hunter, showing up at the house Dean is scanning for EMF, as though she’d stumbled on the same case.

Dean might have tried to blow her off, this is _his_ hunt, but Dylan is hot with long, dark, brown hair that’s only a shade lighter than her eyes. Besides, the pair work really well together; it’s uncanny. If Dean didn’t know any better he’d think this wasn’t their first time teaming up.

Once the box of antique gems is salted and burned, Dean wants to take her out, wants to take her to bed, on some level he doesn’t totally comprehend, he wants to take her home.

The Dylan vessel isn’t as strong as the others, however, too far from the Novak bloodline to withstand the toll of containing an angel and his grace. So when Dean proposes they have a drink for a job well done, Castiel turns him down.

 

In his life, Dean falls in love exactly twice and it’s always with Cas. The first time, he calls him Cassie Robinson.

Cas is selfish and wants to keep Dean, like this, naked in the bed of his vessel’s dorm room, forever. But Dean needs to get going, needs to get Sam from Stanford, needs to start on the path that will land him in hell just so Cas can raise him from it. Just so Dean can pull him from heaven. Just so they can be together, really be together, where they’ll always belong.

It surprises Cas, when Dean opens up about hunting, when he tells Cassie all about the life, all about the family business. It breaks Cas’ heart to break Dean’s, to pretend like he doesn’t believe the hunter’s confessions, to pretend like what he wants is for Dean to leave.

 

Cas only watches after that. He can’t risk interacting with both Winchesters, can’t risk Time and Space and the Continuum. Sometimes he thinks it’s more torturous than if he’d stayed in the bunker. Looking and never touching, never talking, never being seen, it chips away at him.

He caves in small doses. He takes over the vessel of a sheriff, of a pathologist, of a mechanic selling parts. They’re brief encounters, mostly case-related, but charged with something Dean can never name.

Dean is twenty-nine and Hell bound when Cas serves him a beer at a dingy bar.

“Something stronger after this,” Dean pauses to read the name tag. “Casey,” he finishes, looking into the familiar blue eyes of the bartender. He double checks the tag, thinking maybe it’ll read Scottie, or Scott he supposes. The man’s name is Casey.

Cas raises a brow at him and Dean feels properly chastised.

“Please.”

“Of course.”

Dean takes him back to his motel, more grateful than ever that he took the week away from Sam, and Cas lets him. Cas thought brief encounters would be enough, but he was wrong. They’re not. Cas is always going to need more.

It’s Dean’s first time with a man and it’s not what he’s imagined over the years but it’s exactly what he expects from Casey. Casey, who tastes like peanuts and something sweet. His calm nature at the bar translates into the way the man opens him up slow and deliberate. It has Dean ready to come before a condom is even rolled on.

The way Cas slips into him is slow too, too slow for Dean. Dean is angry and afraid and he knows it’s only going to get worse. He knows he’s going to hell. Knows what he’ll become there.

He tries to goad Cas into being rougher, into slamming into him harder, into getting Dean to hurt a little so that he doesn’t drown inside himself.

Cas knows what Dean is doing of course, and it’s not what the man needs. If there’s one thing Cas knows it’s how to take care of Dean Winchester.

Turns out, Dean doesn’t need pain to lose himself that night. The languid but hard drag of Cas’ cock inside him, the murmured words against his spine, the firm press of a hand between his shoulder blades, it all takes Dean somewhere else.

Dean hadn’t been touched like this, this tenderly with so much care, since Cassie, but he's been needing to be touched just like this for years. He feels starved for it and Casey keeps giving and giving.

Dean doesn’t realise he’s about to come until he’s already coming. It’s the best—it’s _the_ best orgasm he’s ever had, though not the best he’ll ever have, which makes sense because it’s the first time Cas fucks him.

It knocks the wind out of his chest but Dean still manages to whine out a _Case_ , the nickname he’d chosen for Casey earlier in the night.

If Cas tries hard enough, he can almost hear Dean saying his real name instead.

They go again an hour later, after a heated discussion about something Cas knows riles Dean up, and then again in the morning before a nap. Cas doesn’t sleep but when Dean slips out of bed he pretends to.

He also pretends he doesn’t know why he does it, but it’s definitely because he doesn’t know how to say goodbye to Dean again, one final time. Cas doesn’t want to.

Dean dies for the first time a few weeks after that.

Four months later he meets Castiel. The angel _feels_ so familiar which is maybe why he decides to trust him so quickly, but Dean doesn’t remember any iteration of Cas he’s met up until then. Cas left those memories in the pit, to keep from jeopardising the future. Everything they do, always for the greater good.

Cas doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore. He’s borrowed too much time from Dean’s youth and he can’t interact with him now that Dean has met him, really met him. Cas is alone. He doesn’t see that ever changing.

 

Dean dies for the last time at forty-two.

His most prominent regret, ridiculously enough because Dean has made greater mistakes in his life than this, is that he doesn’t get the chance to be led around at the garden Cas has raved about. Cas had mentioned sunflowers in the garden once, almost shyly as opposed to how he spoke about all the other exhibits. Dean thinks Cas’ tone meant that he wants to be kissed there. Dean plans to kiss him there. He dies thinking that he never will, doesn’t remember that he already has.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://fanforfanatic.tumblr.com/)


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